I am proud to be Australian. We have a beautiful country filled with unique flora and fauna and today I wanted to create something to honour that.

What you will need:

• Container
• Sand
• Red and yellow food dye (or orange sand ready made)
• Mixing instrument (we used forks)
• Australian animals
• Australian plant life (if you live overseas without access to Aussie plants you could substitute the Gum leaf with a bayleaf)

Optional: Australian animal book such as the pictured ‘An Australian ABC’ by Colin Thiele

We started by dying some sand in the morning. If you have ever been to the Australian outback you will know that the sand/dirt is such a vibrant orange and we could not replicate that but did our best.

First, put your desired amount of sand in a container and tip red and yellow (or orange if you have it) food dye in. You will need more than just a few drops! Start mixing straight away. You will need to mix for quite a while to get an even colour (a great lesson in patience).

As you can see from the pictures we added red first and then yellow after. I do not believe it will make a huge difference what order you mix them in as it binds quite well. Our sand was slightly damp already and I think this helped it mix better.

We put it out in the sun to dry off and in the afternoon it was ready to go!

The animals pictured were specifically chosen as they are represented in the book.

We read the book together and pulled the animals out as we reached them in the story. Just one fun way of using this fantastic play tray!

Have fun!

Amy xx